Taylor Swift Knows “All Too Well” How To Be Creative

While Taylor Swift may just be another cliché, radio pop-singer to some, to me, she’s an icon. Her music goes so far beyond just pumping out cookie-cutter style songs to appeal to a mass listenership. Every song she writes and/or produces (which is literally every single one of her songs) is elegantly crafted with immense attention paid to not only the lyrics and instruments, but also to the way it will make the listener feel and how it could be played live.

To be able to maintain massive success over her decade-long career, Swift has employed a solid, meticulous creative process that has allowed her to change both the genre in which she creates music and the style and sound of her albums. The two most notable switch-ups would have to be, first, the transition from her 2010 country-pop album, Speak Now, to her 2012 full-pop album, Red, and, second, from her dark and electronic 2017 reputation album to her light and instrumental 2019 Lover album. Swift has spoken in many interviews about how she finds inspiration and what motivates her creative process: her friends, her family, her love life, her fans, and even her own imagination. I would also add divergent thinking to the mix, with some analogous thinking, and innate insight and talent, to explain her creative process.

One of Swift’s most well-known songs, “Love Story,” off her 2008 record Fearless, tells the tale of a forbidden, Romeo-and-Juliet-type love. The song’s lyrics paint a picture of ballrooms, gowns, grand staircases, and hideaway gardens, all in the background of a fiery love between two young people, which finds a happy ending with a surprise proposal. Obviously, this is a scenario created from Swift’s imagination. In an interview, she explains the inspiration for the song was from her parents disapproving of a boy she liked in high school. She saw the analogy between Shakespeare’s most tragic love story and her own personal experience, and from that, created a song the entire country was singing along to in 2008.

Although I’m quite sure Swift has spent hundreds of hours perfecting her voice, piano and guitar playing, dancing, and writing skills throughout her career, there’s not in a doubt in my mind parts of her creative products come from strokes of divine inspiration — also known as insight. There’s even video-taped evidence of one of her moments of insight, in which Swift is in what appears to be a recording studio with friend, co-producer, and co-writer Jack Antonoff, while they’re finishing up writing the track “Getaway Car” for her reputation album. Swift is filming them write the chorus for the song, and the two of them are going back and forth with different words and sentences, until Swift visibly perks up as she says/sings, “Don't pretend it's such a mystery, think about the place where you first met me.” Without any hesitation, it’s clear Swift knows this is the right lyric. And sure enough, this is exactly the lyric I sing along to when I blast this song in my car.

That being said, I don’t think all of Swift’s songs were made this way. Many of them are the product of hours upon hours of detailed lyric writing and instrument playing, along with conscientious attention paid to how she wants others to listen and react to her words. In this month’s Rolling Stones profile on Swift, she discussed the role both her imagination and mental imagery play in her songwriting. Most noteworthy was her inspiration for the overall tone of her reputation album compared to that of the album Lover. Swift told the interviewer for the first album, she pictured “nightmare cityscape” and “old warehouse buildings that had been deserted and factory spaces and all this industrial kind of imagery.” This metallic, dystopian vibe is certainly evident on the album, where there’s few songs with percussion or string instruments, but a lot of manufactured, electronic sounds. On the other hand, Lover, she said, is “completely just a barn wood floor and some ripped curtains flowing in the breeze, and fields of flowers and, you know, velvet.” This album captures that picturesque scene perfectly, with many slow, melodic,and instrumental tracks. She also revealed in the interview she sometimes fantasizes about how others could play her song. For the tracks “Lover,” and “Paper Rings” off Lover, Swift said she imagined a wedding band, specifically one from the 70s, where they wouldn’t have had the the same instruments there are today. Swift uses mental imagery to figure out how to portray the feelings and inspiration she has in mind into a written expression that makes the listener feel exactly the way she wants them to.

Now that I’ve (hopefully) convinced you of Swift’s creative prowess, to wrap up, I’ll explain to you why I think she’s not only just creative — but Big C creative.

Big C creativity can transcend both the time in which the creative’s products were made, and the field in which the products exist. I would say Swift’s original field was a type of music that reinvented country-pop. However, she’s recently tried her hand at political activism, by advocating for equal rights. In the first track of her 2014 album 1989, “Welcome to New York,” Swift makes her support for the LGBTQ+ community explicit with the succinct line, “And you can want who you want, boys and boys, and girls and girls.” On Lover, there’s three songs with significant political tones: “You Need to Calm Down,” “The Man,” and “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince.” The first song is probably the most obvious, with the whole second verse dedicated to calling out homophobia: “Why are you mad, when you could be GLAAD? You just need to take several seats and try to restore the peace and control the urge to scream about all the people you hate, cause shade never made anybody less gay.” The music video to this song ends with the link to a website where viewers can sign a petition asking the U.S. Congress to pass “The Equality Act.” The last two songs are more subtle, with “The Man” drawing attention to double standards women are subject to under a patriarchy, and “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince” using the experience of high school as a metaphor for our current political climate. Swift’s creative process in her music is actively affecting change in the field of politics by mobilizing and educating her (predominantly) young audience, which, in my opinion, earns her a title of Big C creative.